Campaigns & Issues

Political, social and environmental consequences and tasks of the workers’ movement

The following CWI Statement was adopted by the CWI’s International Executive Committee (IEC) its recent meeting in Belgium, 2-9 December 2009. This very successful meeting brought together over 70 representatives from Europe and Russia, Asia, Central Asia, Latin and North America and Africa.

The UN’s Copenhagen climate summit has failed to deliver any significant response to the rising threat of global warming. This is unsurprising given recent history of such events, with most industrialised countries currently failing to meet even the grossly insufficient targets agreed at Kyoto back in 1997. This further demonstrates the inability of capitalism to solve the key problems facing the world today.

The reflections of Derek Hanway in the pages of Fortnight magazine (July/August 2009 No. 466) unfortunately have only helped to obscure and distort the facts surrounding racist attacks on Romanian families in Belfast in June.

World leaders are to meet in Copenhagen this December to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol in an attempt to control greenhouse gas emissions. But after their failure to reach the modest target set at Kyoto of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 5.2% from 1990 levels we should not expect that whatever agreement they reach will seriously tackle the threat of climate change.

The BNP is operating from a secret office in Dundonald in Belfast. Located at a business park this ‘call-centre’, as they describe it, it is used to recruit people. They also use it to distribute their far-right propaganda and spout their racist rhetoric around Britain.